What brought Movement legend Angela Davis and a score of radical
activists into action in 2021 on very short notice to demand "the
only treatment is freedom?" It was the reality the world Left
might lose one of its most prominent voices to COVID-19. That voice
belongs to Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and award-winning
National Public Radio journalist who is arguably the world's most
famous political prisoner. Convicted of murder in 1982 and the author
of more than 10 books and 2,000 Op-Eds for print and radio broadcast,
Abu-Jamal is easily the world's most famous contemporary prison
writer. The Trials of Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Biography in 25 Voices
is a collective evaluation of his life as told by those who know him
best-his friends and allies. Edited by Abu-Jamal biographer Todd
Steven Burroughs, it chronicles the struggles to get Abu-Jamal the
health care he needed in 2021 as well as his life of radical,
decolonized activism in the face of his monitoring by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation's counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO)
while a teenage Black Panther in Philadelphia and, later, as an
inmate, decades of extraordinary repression by the state of
Pennsylvania.